Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

‘I hear some councils are thinking of moving their homeless to pre-fab settlements on the outskirts of the city,’ Jenny commented. ‘Sort of a township concept. We’ve a lot to learn from the South Africans in this respect, I always say.’

‘One day Steven’s mother took an overdose, by accident or on purpose. The room was kept bolted from the inside, for protection. Those places are pretty rough, the police said. People get raped and beaten up on the stairs. But Steven was only seven years old. He wasn’t strong enough to open the bolts by himself, even after he realized that his mother wasn’t going to wake up. In the end someone heard his hammering on the door, but it took a long time. No one paid much attention to screams or banging in that place. When they broke down the door the body was starting to decompose. She’d been dead almost a week. Steven had been with her all that time, waiting for her to wake up.’

Aileen grabbed a deep breath and tried to ride the wave of emotion that threatened her. In the end it rolled by without breaking.

‘I must go,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Steven’s social worker is coming to pick him up at three, and I have to try and explain things to him first. What are you doing this evening, Jenny? Douglas is away, and I was wondering if — ’

‘Jon and I have to go to a do at LWT, unfortunately. The usual rent-a-celebrity crowd will be there and it’s important for him to get out and network-build. Did I tell you that he’s in this big new series on famine they’re planning? Off-camera, but you’ll hear him interviewing the victims. He’s quite high profile in Third World disasters, apparently.’

Catching Aileen’s eye, Jenny covered herself by laughing cynically. ‘We’re having a few people over tomorrow for fondue bourguignonne,’ she said as she turned to go. ‘Drop by if you like. I expect we can find an extra fork.’

‘I’m going away, actually,’ Aileen lied.

She stubbed out her cigarette and walked over to the window, with floorboards flexing beneath her. The glass was flecked with drops of rain so fine they seemed to hang motionless in the air, as though the clouds had collapsed under their own weight like an old ceiling. She stood there thinking how clever she’d been, explaining away her emotion without mentioning its real cause. For Aileen hadn’t told Jenny everything she’d learned from the police, not by a long chalk. She hadn’t told her that one reason why Steven and his mother had been living in squalor was that the woman’s lover, who was also the courier who brought the cannabis in from the Continent, had absconded with her savings, which she’d given him to buy them tickets to safety. By then she knew that she was pregnant, and she’d also begun to suspect that her house in south London, which was used to store the drugs, was under surveillance. When the police finally moved in, a few weeks later, her lover was the only one to escape arrest. Steven’s mother told the police that he’d arranged to meet her at Heathrow with the tickets, but didn’t turn up. It was later established that he had flown from Gatwick to Holland and then back to his native America. The case was relatively insignificant by US standards, and it hadn’t been thought worthwhile to apply for extradition, even though the man’s name and address were known to the police, as indeed they were to Aileen.

That explained a lot, she thought. It explained the likeness between Steven and Raymond, which had so disturbed her. It explained Raymond’s frequent unexplained absences from Brighton, and the fact that he always had plenty of money even though his father proved to be neither rich nor generous. It explained why a man so attractive to women had taken up with a girl like Aileen, plain and shy but so ‘typically English and straight’ that her presence on the pillion of his motorbike ensured that he was always waved through Customs after their brief trips across the Channel. It explained why he had flown back to America so unexpectedly, supposedly to visit a mother who later turned out to have been dead for years, and why he hadn’t bothered to answer Aileen’s passionate letters or seemed particularly overjoyed when she turned up on his doorstep that summer. She should have felt relieved, she supposed. Her instincts had been justified; she wasn’t crazy after all. Raymond really was the boy’s father. That should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. In fact she didn’t feel anything very much, not yet. Her tears had been for the boy. As for herself, she was like a character in a cartoon film who has walked off the edge of a cliff without realizing it and strolls blithely on in defiance of the laws of gravity, protected by his blissful ignorance. Sooner or later, she knew, the reality of what had happened would come home to her and she would drop like a stone.

Her breath had misted the glass in front of her, obscuring the view. Idly she traced the words EAT, SHIT, DIE, BOX with her fingertip. Then she hastily rubbed them out, clearing the glass. There was work to do, and thanks to what the police had told her she was able to approach her talk with Steven in a more positive frame of mind than she would have imagined possible a few hours earlier. The information might have been personally devastating, but professionally it was a godsend. For the first time, Aileen felt that she understood the situation in depth, clearly and completely. Steven Bradley had already suffered more than enough pain for one lifetime, but from now on, she vowed, things would be different. His mother and father were both dead, but the boy would be saved from the wreckage to grow up whole and healthy. Everyone who had come into contact with him agreed that the core of his personality was still intact; indeed, this was one reason why he had not been considered ill enough to warrant in-patient status. But the proper treatment of his psychological injuries had been hampered by their ignorance of their real cause and nature. Now that had been cleared up, Aileen felt confident that he would make a swift and full recovery.

She timed her arrival in Green Ward for just before two o’clock, so as to catch the boy before he could go off with the others to start the afternoon’s activities. When she entered the ward sitting room, Steven was gamely trying to clean the floor with a large industrial vacuum cleaner which made so much noise that he didn’t hear her call him. Aileen stood watching with the feeling of slight distaste that always came over when she saw patients performing tasks labelled ‘work therapy’, although in her view this amounted to little more than coping with staff shortages by exploiting the patients in a way that confirmed their tendency to become institutionalized. It was only after some time that she realized that these thoughts were only possible because the giddy sense of vertigo that had always threatened her encounters with the boy was completely absent. Now she knew the source of those mysterious promptings, their power had been exorcized. When Steven finally switched off the vacuum cleaner, it cost Aileen no effort to go up to him, touch him gently on the shoulder and say, in a kindly but restrained tone, ‘Steven, I’d like a word with you, please.’

They sat down together on a sofa facing the outer wall, whose chessboard pattern here generated two large windows at knee level and half of another just below the ceiling.

‘Did you enjoy your lunch?’ Aileen asked while she waited for the other patients to disperse. As usual, the boy just shrugged.

‘I didn’t have any,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t have time. I had to go and see the police. They’re very pleased, because they’ve finally caught the person who did those terrible things. And it’s all thanks to you, Steven.’

He glanced at her with a look of alarm.